Why might my site be yo-yo-ing?

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Silent_Bob

10:19 am on Jun 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

For most of my keywords my site holds pretty steady in the top few results. However for the main keyphrase in our industry we seem to keep yo-yo-ing between 8th position and complete obscurity. The rest of the top 20 are pretty solid and unmoving but every few days our site alone either gets back to around #8 or drops to nowhere.

Any ideas why this might be? We escaped the sandbox long ago and I've not modified the homepage in quite some time. Still it keeps disappearing then reappearing. Every time it disappears I think about making seo changes only for it to reappear before I can make them. I'm quite happy at #8 as its a very competitive phrase so whilst its there I'm not worried about making any modifications. I'm not happy when its not even in the top 50 though obviously!

davthp

12:00 pm on Jun 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

Google are doing an update I've heard

MkSlim

4:04 pm on Jun 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm seeing the same thing with my website. One day on the top, the next nowhere to be found

it's very frustrating

Mk

DaveAtIFG

tahiti

4:25 pm on Jun 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

yep, you bet-cha!~

my site is swinging for my money terms from the top #1~#3 to the deep down valley of page57 of Google SERP. day in day out; DC to DC -- the ranking just cant stop yo-yo-ing and the worst part -- I DON'T KNOW WHY!

however, not all sites in my industry are swinging. there's one very unique site ...with quite a lousy design (in my narrow opinion) is doing superb for all the time ...stand strong #1 on the main 10-15 money terms. and i cant find out the reason why this is happening. anyone interested in this site URL are welcome to sticky me ..wish to hear from your opinion on why it's doing that good.

Silent_Bob

8:43 am on Jun 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

Back up to #8 today, after being nowhere yesterday. Really bizarre. Likewise, the rest of the serps around us still dont seem to change - just us. I cant think of any reason why it would be happening - our site is very clean seo-wise so I cant imagine why it would be a penalty that keeps being applied.

danjohn1234

8:44 pm on Jun 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

A site I am promoting is doing the exact same thing. We recently placed some 301 redirects and I think this might have something to do with it, but I'm not sure. It's still very frustrating. I'm just hoping things settle out for the better when the updates is over.

jdMorgan

Google is not one big computer with a single index; Google has thousands of servers worldwide. Each time you do a search, you will likely be connected to a different server due to routing and load-sharing technology. Many of these servers have not been updated, or contain only partial updates, or even experimental updates. And these updates across all data centers are likely to continue for several more days, as stated by GoogleGuy. He hinted that he expects that the updates will be finished before the WebmasterWorld search conference, which starts June 21st.

I think there are several more productive things to do [webmasterworld.com] for 17 days, rather than watching my site ranks fluctuate while Google does an update. :)

Jim

androidtech

1:43 am on Jun 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Maybe this is just he way it's going to be: rotating placements?

To really know we'd need one of the all-server monitoring types, to watch a few of the yo-yo sites and tell us if the rotation continues across servers round-robin fashion, or if they "roll across" the servers like a wave as Google updates the data centers.

I've wondered if Google, since they do have so many datacenters, might be continually analyzing clickthrough rates of different sites as they algorithmically move certain sites around in the SERPs; as a way to detemine which sites attract the most interest from surfers.